Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising UKReview

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First-person warfare simulation aims high, nearly hits.

By Simon Munk

The squad medic lies moaning, bleeding out halfway back down the hill. Do you risk crawling the twenty metres on your belly to administer a field dressing? Dilemmas of choice are what sets Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising apart from the current glut of other first-person modern war fare.

If you crawl back, you could wind up a target yourself. So do you call in your only howitzer strike against the machine gunners and riflemen pinning down your squad? It's a valuable resource, and even if you use it, your medic might be dead by the time you can get to him. Perhaps it's better to just make a panicked sprint for the trees while your squaddies lay down covering fire, to try and flank the entrenched enemy positions and then move on, leaving you without a medic mid-assault?

Your choice.

While other current affairs shooters like Modern Warfare and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter funnel you through high-intensity pinch points, the emphasis with Operation Flashpoint 2 is on complete freedom of choice and strategy-under-fire in a far more realistic warzone. It's all about making tough decisions, fast.

It is, in that sense, an accurate sequel to the ground-breaking 2001 original Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. Its true rivals are Arma II (made by the original Operation Flashpoint developers) and, to a lesser extent, squad-ordering series like Brothers In Arms and Full Spectrum Warrior.

You roam a vast environment (the map spans 220 square kilometres), choose your approach to each conflict with near total-freedom of choice, and your choices have serious consequences. Operation Flashpoint 2, like the original, prides itself on serious simulation-level accuracy: it only takes a few shots to die, you can bleed out, if untreated, from even minor wounds and anywhere you can see, you can go (to get there, you can jump into any vehicle you find on the field – from jeeps to tanks to helicopters). You even need to take into account bullet trajectories on long-range shots.

This makes combat highly realistic – slow and scary at times, fast and furious at others. And the plotting matches that – with at least a vaguely credible scenario, and locations based on a real island.

You're the leader of a four-man US Marine squad sent in to the island of Skira off the coast of Japan. The Chinese People's Liberation Army has invaded, on a historical pretext of ownership, but really to grab the island's recently-found oil reserves from its Russian owners. US forces are going in to try and stop a major international incident from developing into full-blown war.

The scenario is plausible enough, but quickly fades into the background to be replaced with short, acronym-heavy briefings, mostly telling you to go somewhere and slot a bunch of bad guys. That's no terrible thing though – terse mission briefings win out over dull cut-scene exposition most times. And since when did soldiers want loads of extra information? They just want to know where to go and what to do.

Single-player, Operation Flashpoint 2 plays out across 11 missions, starting with a smaller tutorial island off the coast of Skira, then moving on to the main meal. Your four man squad changes weapon load-out dramatically from mission to mission – sometimes you're in full-on stealth mode with suppressed weaponry, sometimes assault mode.

Oddly for this type of game, you don't have any choice in terms of the weaponry you tote or even the specialists your squad is made up of. But while the load-out system may be stripped down in comparison to some military shooters, once you're out in the wild, Operation Flashpoint 2 shines. Tasked with flushing out a village you can choose all sorts of different approaches to your attack; your squad and enemy troops will adapt their tactics to the changing situation. The AI in these moments is often stunning – with both sides efficiently flanking, laying down covering fire, lobbing grenades etc. without much intervention from you.

This open-world approach is where Dragon Rising is at its best – you can steal vehicles, go in stealthy or suppress and flank – sending half the squad one way, while you go the other. And in the end, you'll need to master all of these strategies and more, particularly to cope with multi-player.

However you tackle each situation, no firefight in Operation Flashpoint 2 will match the adrenaline of Modern Warfare, and even its most intense sequences can't match anything Infinity Ward have come up with for sheer speed rush.